You've cocked up the VPN.
I have 100Mbps Virgin cable, running consistently at 103Mbps
The new version on VPNs only allows me to select a continent or Optimal. This is a step backwards.
Selecting "Europe" or "Optimal" only gives me less than 2Mbps; ridiculous.
The old system allowed me to select countries at my choice. I am in the UK and I noticed that when Optimal selected France it was rarely above 25Mbps, too slow.
When I chose Germany, even though it was father away, I was getting above 75Mbps.
Now I cannot get above 2Mbps BECAUSE you do not offer me the flexibility to chose at country level.WHAT'S GOING ON ??? !!!
2Mbps is not good enough.

I've been using Opera VPN for a while and, aside from the sites that simply block it, performance has been fine. That changed earlier today. Pages are slow to load (like being on dial up) and streaming quality is poor (when I turn off VPN and reload the quality is fine). Not sure what's changed, though it looks like I'm on a new VPN version now (judging from the different list of virtual locations).

@alanchippy I just updated to 50.0.2762.45. No improvement relative to speed while using VPN, which makes sense due to the VPN service being a server resource rather than the browser client itself. Opera will have to change the VPN backend before we'll see any performance improvement. My speeds through my 50Mbps ISP connection drop to less than 1.5Mbps downloads and less than 1Mbps when using the Opera VPN.

You've cocked up the VPN.
I have 100Mbps Virgin cable, running consistently at 103Mbps
The new version on VPNs only allows me to select a continent or Optimal. This is a step backwards.
Selecting "Europe" or "Optimal" only gives me less than 2Mbps; ridiculous.
The old system allowed me to select countries at my choice. I am in the UK and I noticed that when Optimal selected France it was rarely above 25Mbps, too slow.
When I chose Germany, even though it was father away, I was getting above 75Mbps.
Now I cannot get above 2Mbps BECAUSE you do not offer me the flexibility to chose at country level.
WHAT'S GOING ON ??? !!!
2Mbps is not good enough.

I was using the Opera VPN connection to reach one single site, which was not allowed for direct access from my workplace. This morning, in the early hours, it worked fine. After leaving it alone for 1 hour due to a meeting I had to go to, when I came back to my desk, I have seen, VPN is not configured for this version. Upgrade your browser message. Without a doubt, I upgraded and restarted the browser.

Now, I can go to any site as long as VPN is not active, but of course the site that was previously and is still blocked. As soon as I activate VPN, regardless which area I choose, all pages go into connecting (spinning wheel) mode and become unreachable.

I have searched for possible solutions using my google powers. Everybody is pointing to modifying the malware blocking applications exception list and adding operavpn there. Well, as I am working on a corporate owned machine, I do not have that luxury and it was, I mean operavpn was allowed (maybe implicitly) this morning and we don't change settings in the midday as a policy at my workplace. I am in IT and I know it. So, something on OperaVPN end has changed and rendered it useless.

What the heck is going on with this VPN, regardless of the continent the IP is restricted to Sweden which makes it unusable for me, had to install the SurfEasy Proxy extension to sort this out in the meanwhile.

I guess as a random someone who never paid anything for Opera I have little right to complain about anything in the first place...

However as it currently stands I can no longer use Opera with the HEAVY DOWNGRADE of VPN in Opera 50.

Today I was forced to update Opera since "VPN is no longer Supported" and what I got was horrible.
Instead of being able to choose specific Countries USA, Netherlands, Germany I'm now resricted to continents. That would not be that much of a problem.... But the Speed of the VPN connection is bad joke... Simple sites are loading for ages... video streaming... lol! forget that!

(OFC... I already tried alot to fix this aka antivirus, router, third party - no use)

The main usage of my Opera was to avoid the strict region locks I have to suffer when using streaming provider such as Crunchyroll. Sadly - that's impossible now.

If that's not going to be fixed I'll have to look for another solution and there's little reason for me left to use Opera at all.

@flyboy
I'm going back to HOXX on FireFox. I get only 2% to 5% reduction in download speed. Oh, and they have an IP leak stopper as well!
It's unacceptable that Opera's developers didn't test the last 2 releases thoroughly enough to spot such a flaw. Holiday or not, this is unprofessional.